URBAN PRISONER, A PHOTO PROJECT BY MATT WEBBER

Matt Weber a photographer coming from New York, first started taking photographs while working as a NYC taxi driver. He soon discovered that the idea of seeing something and recording it was really what he’d been doing all along, mentally framing shots as he drove around town on twelve hour shifts. Gradually his confidence began to build, and he began to see himself as a photographer with a taxi, rather than a cabbie with a camera.

Weber’s project, Urban Prisoner, also published as book can be viewed as a revival of classic street photography, as Lifson points out in his introduction, “he works at being nobody but himself.” Images go from despairing to hopeful, alarming to mundane, but are never contrived, moments which appeared on their own, rather than being orchestrated to achieve their effect. His strongest pictures have no minor subjects or incidental matter and thus achieve a seamless coherence of subject and context.